World Cup 2010 breaks records on Twitter but are the Tweets worth reading? Are your Hotel's Tweets worth reading?

Being a huge World Cup follower, I decided to do some research on the World Cup's impact on the web. According to Akamai's Net Usage Index, the game between USA vs Algeria on Wednesday saw a traffic spike to 11.2 million visitors per minute during the Landon Donovan goal in the 91st minute. It moved past the 2008 Presidential election!

Breaking it down further, on average Twitter normally sees about 750 tweets per second. During the World Cup Games, records were being broken to 3,000 tweets per second during the games goals.

That's a lot of Tweets. What had me curious was the quality of Tweets vs. the quanity of them.

So besides the typical "Gooooaaaalll" Tweets when a favorite team scored, what relevant information was actually being shared? I came across an article from Esquire which broke down the chatter on Twitter during the World Cup games, "10.6 percent meaningful conversation and 6 percent self-promotion, plus 8.4 percent spam, 30 percent babble, 42 percent re-tweets... and only 2.4 percent legitimate news".

So now I bet you're wondering why is she talking about the World Cup when she should be blogging about hotels using social media as a marketing tool.

Two reasons.

The first and most important reason:

You say your hotel already participates in social media and networking. But what exactly are you saying to give substance to your followers. Those statistics I mentioned from Esquire are extremely telling, on an exaggerated scale, but I believe make a very good point on the overall ratio of chatter.

If the intern you hired is only adding to the "30% babble" on Tweeter about your hotel, what is the value added to your hotel's business? How effectively is it meeting your social media marketing goals and objectives? Do you have a plan in place to achieve those goals?

It's time to have a strategy regarding your social media marketing plan. Tweeting babble can be fun, but effectively participating in the "10.4% of meaningful conversation" and "2.4% of legitimate news" is what will yield results for your hotel's business.

Now the second reason? I have World Cup frenzy - my favorite team got eliminated yesterday but Wednesday the USA advanced to the Round of 16!

Go USA!

Until next time,

Rosella

CoMMingle Social Media Marketing Manager

Plan. Socialize. Engage. Measure.